From the UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER and the “I blame Edison” department.
CREDIT
Falchi et al, Science Advances; Jakob Grothe/National Park Service, Matthew Price/CIRES/CU-Boulder.
The Milky Way, the brilliant river of stars that has dominated the night sky and human imaginations since time immemorial, is but a faded memory to one third of humanity and 80 percent of Americans, according to a new global atlas of light pollution produced by Italian and American scientists.
Light pollution is one of the most pervasive forms of environmental alteration. In most developed countries, the ubiquitous presence of artificial lights creates a luminous fog that swamps the stars and constellations of the night sky.
“We’ve got whole generations of people in the United States who have never seen the Milky Way,” said Chris Elvidge, a scientist with NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information in Boulder, Colorado. “It’s a big part of our connection to the cosmos — and it’s been lost.”
Elvidge, along with Kimberly Baugh of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, is part of a team that just updated a global atlas of light pollution published today in the journal Science Advances. Using high-resolution satellite data and precision sky brightness measurements, their study produced the most accurate assessment yet of the global impact of light pollution.
“I hope that this atlas will finally open the eyes of people to light pollution,” said lead author Fabio Falchi from the Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute in Italy.
The atlas takes advantage of low-light imaging now available from the NOAA/NASA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite, calibrated by thousands of ground observations.
Light pollution is most extensive in countries like Singapore, Italy and South Korea, while Canada and Australia retain the most dark sky. In western Europe, only small areas of night sky remain relatively undiminished, mainly in Scotland, Sweden and Norway. Despite the vast open spaces of the American west, almost half of the U.S. experiences light-polluted nights.
“In the U.S., some of our national parks are just about the last refuge of darkness – places like Yellowstone and the desert southwest,” said co-author Dan Duriscoe of the National Park Service. “We’re lucky to have a lot of public land that provides a buffer from large cities.”
Light pollution does more than rob humans of the opportunity to ponder the night sky. Unnatural light can confuse or expose wildlife like insects, birds and sea turtles, with often fatal consequences.
Fortunately, light pollution can be controlled by shielding lights to limit shine to the immediate area, reducing lighting to the minimum amount needed — or by simply turning them off.
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In other news, North Korea still offers the Milky Way as the only free entertainment available at night, except in Pyongyang.
When I was a boy growing up in Los Angeles, I never understood how ancient mariners could navigate by the stars. When I took my first offshore sail and got over the horizon I remember looking up at the night sky in awe and thinking oh, that’s how.
On balance, I’d rather have more light than less. Labelling something so useful as pollution is irresponsible and deceitful.
Those who advocate for concentrating the population in cities better not be the same people labelling light “pollution” because it prevents naked-eye viewing of the Milky Way.
Real light pollution is actually lighting spillover, meaning light which is wasted. The idea is to direct it down to where it is needed. There are ways of reducing it, but they do cost money.
The light labeled “pollution” isn’t useful for anything. Its waste, pure and simple, and you pay for it. Light on the ground, or where you need to see is useful; light reflecting off haze 20,000 feet over your head is not doing anything useful.
If Obama has his way, we’ll all look like N Korea at night, soon.
In 1959 I could look up in a clear sky at night and see the strip of stars across the sky that was the Milky Way. It was easy as pie. I lived 22 miles out side of NYC in North Jersey.
Now I live 33 miles out side NYC in North Jersey and all I can see is Venus, sometimes Mars and Jupiter, and Sometimes I can make out Big and Little Dipper. Orion can be seen in Winter. The summer has terrible seeing because of Haze and Spill Light from Streets, Auto Dealers, Vast Parking Lots at Malls, and the required Lumens for ATM Machines.
Not seeing the MW is old news, By the 70’s it was lost in these parts. Sodium Vapor and everybody’s fear of the dark, crime put an end to small Incandesent street lights.
Glen Ridge, NJ still has Gas Light street lighting. Its the most pleasant mellow lighting there is, a very soft yellow glow. Ride through the back streets after a fresh snowfall and you could swear you traveled back in time 125 years. I would bet you would have an easier time seeing the MW there.
Correct me if I am wrong (no news there then) but aren’t some of these photographs taken though an infra red or some such filter which enhances the apparent effect of urban lighting. After all, if that’s how bright things are from space & very high altitude, I would have though folks down on the ground would need sunglasses at see at night!
You are not wrong. That photo is enhanced and very exaggerated and constitutes green propaganda.
Yes the Milky Way is propaganda. “They” are just trying to trick us.
Boo hoo! Humanity is soooo baaaad.
No FJ, not all of Humanity. Pretty well just the greedy, capitalist ones and others who benefit from the fouling of our nest. Me included.
One of the positives of living in the north Mojave Desert is the relatively dark sky I have at my house – I can walk out my front door and see the Milky Way from about 20 degrees above horizon. I too use telescopes but I’m more of a planetary/lunar observer – 8 inch F14 achromatic refractor.
The darkest skies I’ve seen, by far, were in the middle of the South Pacific. 1978 I was on the USS Prairie AD-15 and we keep breaking down and going DIW (dead in water) for days at a time. The conditions were amazing, windless super clear atmosphere, blazing smooth green/blue ocean during the days, astounding blaze of stars in a satin black sky at night. Just the faint ionization band near the horizon above a pitch black sea. Constellations were difficult to make out because of the crowding of other stars. I had a good pair of binos – I could hardy see a difference in the scene the unaided sky was so dark. It took us 4 weeks to make the transit Pearl Harbor to the Philippines which I think was a stroke of good fortune for me.
The best land skies I’ve seen have been high up (> 12000′) in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and the neighboring White Mountains. Barcroft Saddle in the White Mountains is one of the higher places you can drive an ordinary car to in the U.S.. It’s the trailhead for hiking 14000′ White Mountain. It’s also a very dark site for star grazers but you have to be hardy because it’s usually very cold and windy, even in the summer.
That is what you can expect when you take a destroyer tender out to sea. They are meant to be welded to a pier somewhere.
And the assault on man’s mind continues.
See the great advantage of living in North Korea. You can see the milky way if you have the strength to get out the door. Or better yet, [if] you have a window in your prison cell.
Reblogged this on Astronomy Topic Of The Day and commented:
Reblogged from an article published in Watts Up With That, Monday, June 13, 2016
Growing up in rural mid-Suffolk county in the late 1960s, the night sky and the Milky Way were mainstays for me and largely contributed to my life-long love affair with the stars and the natural universe. They were, in large part, the inspiration that fueled what would begin as a hobby, building an observatory in my backyard at age 13 to house my modest telescope, where I would read every book I could find on astronomy, to a profession today, teaching young minds about the universe, attempting to instill in them the inspiration that I experienced as a young boy.
I thought the sky as I had witnessed it in mid-central Long Island was as good as it gets, unaware of the slow and inexorable growth of light pollution that was ever so slowly stealing away the sky’s natural beauty; the milky way, its sublime and ethereal being gradually diminished, replaced with the garish and ugly lights of man; this spectacle of nature, revealing herself in the largest and grandest possible extent, our galaxy, our home in the cosmos, was slowly disappearing.
On a 1972 camping trip to the White Mountains of New Hampshire with my father, I came to learn what I once had 10 years earlier at my childhood home when I emerged from our tent, wondering what the source of the light was outside. My breath was taken away at the reflection of the Milky Way in Lake Winnipesauke, that the Milky Way was the source of the light and was casting a shadow and that you could navigate what was otherwise a pitch-dark campground by it without a flashlight!
A piece in the current issue of the Christian Science Monitor discusses what many of us in the Astronomical community have known for over 4 decades, that the night sky is being slowly taken away from us, that over 33% of humanity today cannot enjoy the splendor of the night sky, the diamonds set in a velvety black background, the majesty of the Milky Way, the greatest lightshow ever imagined is invisible to much of humanity.
I have often written of the need for increased education in the STEM fields, how that would be a good place to start, to stem the growth of pseudoscience, religious extremism and the clear onset of a new intellectual dark age. The 2009 International Year of Astronomy was such an attempt but that effort has waned considerably, largely forgotten after almost seven years, although the website(s) and some of the projects continue to this day.
The simple act of looking up at the sky after sunset, watching the stars slowly come out, the Milky Way slowly becoming visible during twilight is all that’s necessary to inspire the current generation of young minds and is, I would argue, the antidote and cure to such horrific acts of violence as what happened in Orlando, Florida over the weekend. This was an act of hate, perhaps, but it was also motivated by fundamentalist religious extremism. Nature abhors a vacuum and will quickly find a substitute; a society bereft of any meaningful inspiration will quickly devolve, spiraling to ever darker and darker depths.
It’s no wonder that there is no one today to fill the shoes of such greats as Carl Sagan, one individual who inspired my generation; no one can see the night sky anymore. The sources of inspiration are gone, replaced by endless shopping mall after shopping mall, movie theatres, car dealerships; the list is almost endless.
Humanity is being disenfranchised of her birthright. Shield the lights, turn them off (reducing our collective carbon footprint in the process) and let us be inspired once again.
It’s really quite easy to affect a change here. Support the efforts of such groups as The International Dark Sky Association whose mission is to educate, inform and assist. Get involved in your local communities and civic associations; become informed and advocate for sensible dark sky ordinances at the local level. One person can make a difference; we owe it to ourselves, our progeny and all future generations who may never know what it was like to simply look up in awe and wonder at the night sky.
I consider the safety provided by urban lighting to be a good trade for a perpetual viewing of the Milky Way.
Yes that’s is the trade-off. But what affect does removing that source of nightly wonder do to the modern urban psyche? One more step removed from the natural world and the sense of oneness with it?
And if that is the case, does that go some way in explaining our propensity to treat it poorly.
Oneness with nature doesn’t just mean looking up at the stars with wonder.
I am sure that some poor african who is being consumed by a lion is really happy by the sense of “oneness with it”.
Me – I am quite happy with occasional drive to a places where Milky Way is visible. In my evil, fossil-fuel burning car.
Have you ever seen the Milky Way from a desert location or from the top of a mountain? The “safety provided by urban lighting” is an illusion. The FBI and the DOJ have conducted studies that show an actual increase in the crime rate with increased nighttime lighting levels.The use of bight lights, Yardblasters or over-lit streets != safety.
Emission Nebulae glow in the light from ionizing whatever element it is composed of, hydrogen, and oxygen are typical, hydrogen alpha which makes up a lot of such gas is in the near infrared, usually the Bayer color filters used in full color sensors has to be removed to get a better signal. But the atm is clear in this wavelength.
The Andromeda galaxy I posted up a ways is the best about 19 hours of 5 minute exposures, out of the 40 some hours I collected, the subs are added to each other, signal sums faster than background, but under bright night skies, the signal can be 10 photons above background, and takes a tremendous number of subs, the darker the skies are the more signal you can collect without saturating the sensor pixels.
Once stacked, you can do various cleaning of the image, I do very little, mostly just adjust black point, but it is still far far from being fabricated.
Some of us can still remember growing up in societies and communities where dark nights held no menace. The acoustic environment was also dark and both hearing and vision could explore the environment with maximum sensitivity A lost world..
The cosmos used to be a cosy place, not any more. Turned out it is unimaginably, and frankly, quite unnecessarily large. Volume of space seen from Earth, whenever that luminous fog is lifted, is more than ten-to-the seventy cubic kilometer, mostly filled with emptiness, and on top of that, deadly radiation. It is an awfully horrible construct. It is quite sufficient to know it is out there, who the heck would want to see it?
Scintillating star light reaching our retina from looking at the MilkyWay may be a kind of hormonal regulator that is also dose
dependent in regards to it’s effect. Usually we would have viewed it for only part of the night & been sleeping more hours of the night than staring at the MilkyWay.
Modern night lighting has less “twinkling” pulses at our retina & it
is has not been polarized the same way star light has been by galaxys’ “dust” before reaching our eyes. Plus, when living under star lit night sky we experience cycles of night light intensity when MilkWay obscured by clouds, moon phases play out & a progressive ebb toward dawn. Under modern night lighting the clouded sky can still be reflecting down light, only full/new moon
light make a significant cyclic difference & the ebb in light toward dawn has shorter break.
Humans normally have hormonal cycles in a 24 hour period. One example is our level of cortisol; ancestrally programmed to rise before dawn & prime us for getting going.
Another may (?) be that compounds in our retina act on thyroid level (a thyro-tropin “like” compound has been found in rodent retina). I have not check recently for humans, but think in rats thyro-tropin level dropping has a delay of ~ 2 hours come dark & reaches it’s lowest level ~4 hours into the night (in rats – so am extrapolating for what follows).
My speculation is that our archaic pattern of MilkyWay light exposure would be a partial thyroid setting dynamic. We were
getting periodic high levels of scintillation that boosted the thyroid by sustaining thyro-tropin levels when this would otherwise start to fall off ~ 2 hours into darkness because we were still awake checking up every now & then at the MilkyWay.
By ~4 hours into the dark we’d normally be asleep; but the earlier night sky light dose gave us a higher base-line thyro-tropin, so on clearer nights on those nights our minimum level was less. By living exposed to variable night light influences we avoided a purely “steady” state of thyroid hormonal pattern &, although introduced unpredictable factors, we got beneficial “gain” of function. Likewise, whenever we’d wake during the night & take a look at the night sky we’d get a pulse of scintillating light.
Edit: last paragraph re: clearer night our “… minimum level was less …” should add word ” severe.”
Personally, I am glad to have the Internet instead.
On the desert north of Yuma, AZ, I spent many nights setting up equipment related to my work. At 3 am the sky was so bright on moonless nights there was enough light to see without turning on artificial lights. With an 80-inch folded lens mounted to a standard video camera we could image Saturn including its rings and moons, and the disk of striped Jupiter with many of its moons. It never failed to fill me with awe.
The lack of electric light in most of the African continent is a disgrace. But greenies are all for impoverishment.
I was in the Zulu-Natal section of South Africa one summer, on top of a mountain. When I stepped outside (we were staying at the only available lodgings for mountains around us), When I stepped outside the first night, I was taken aback–almost frightened–at the star show, and the light they provided. (1) I’ve never seen phony pictures of night skies with the spectacular brilliant clarity and nearness of stars, not even in the Rockies. (2) From my earthly perspective, it seemed as if every square foot had a sparkler.
it was the first time I understood how the observant ancients could use the stars to navigate and why they came up with the idea.
On a separate note: I know nothing about astronomy or stars appearing. Why would the stars seem so bright and plentiful in a place like Zulu-Natal, but you can’t seem them from the moon (as photos show)?
“see them” Damn autocorrect.
MRW-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Examination_of_Apollo_Moon_photographs#There_are_no_stars_in_any_of_the_photos
Same reason as the topic-light pollution. The entire surface of the moon is highly reflective, ANY light shining on it from the Sun produces “light pollution” that prevents the stars from being viewed from the surface. The stars don’t disappear during the “daytime” on Earth no matter where you live, they are always there shining away. You just cannot see them when the Sun is shining.
Aphan,
Is that also an issue in Antarctica and the Arctic Circle? Wit the albedo I mean?
That’s been explained many times.
It has to do with the foreground being bright, so the aperture of the cameras is set low.
If you mask out the foreground, and turn up the contrast on those pictures, the stars show up.
I think if we were to land on the dark side of the moon, the stars would be much brighter, but the landing and surface navigation much more difficult.
Because it seem them photos on the moon were taken in the day time.
The moon is very very bright as an astronomical object. I need to use 1/200s or less to get good exposures, and even the planets require multiple seconds.
Thanks, Aphan and MarkW.
So it sounds like we have a “whole generation of people” whose parents never took them anywhere, or they themselves have never ventured beyond the limits of the city they were born in. How sad is that?
I live in the Mountain west and its easy to find a place dark enough to see the Milky Way. You don’t even have to go to a “National Forest” to get that view either. Just drive any stretch of highway long enough to lose the “glow” from a major city or town, pull off the road, and look UP. Or drive up a canyon far enough that the “light pollution” is blocked by the side of a mountain. There are VAST sections of highway in the Western US where this is possible-so I find it sad that an entire “generation” of people have never camped, hiked, taken a road trip, or traveled outside of a brightly lit city even ONCE in their entire lives.
That’s probably why a lot of people “believe” in AGW-if they think that the whole world experiences the exact same things they do (like not knowing what the night sky really looks like), and if it seems to be, or even IS warming where they live, then surely it must be for everyone else too. They have no true grasp that what they experience or “see” is not a “clear view of reality”….that others see and experience something VASTLY different than they do-even when they look at the very same thing.
Spot on about our beautiful highway system, Aphan. And did you notice that the only land that is recognized as being free of these polluting “anthropogenic photons” is land owned by the Federal Government?
It is right here:
Yes would someone mind removing the cloud cover in Washington.
The most astonishing view of the stars in the desert. There is an exit out near the border between California and Arizona where it is so dark and dry that the stars seem to dangle around your head.
Ah but then, within open, free Protestant countries (the steel/coal/cement/electriciy culture) it seems we are able to view the Milky Way in more than the visible light spectrum, and in greater detail than ever imagined.
The Heart of the Milky Way in radio waves
http://s32.postimg.org/npeoj99yd/GC_radioarc.jpg
Do the people with the honor of living in dark villages and huts (close to the earth and with an unbroken “connection to the cosmos”) get to see the helix perpendicular to the galactic plane?
http://www.holoscience.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Double-Helix-Nebula.jpg
It is a lovely structure.
As I explained above, I saw it in Zulu-Natal country–it seemed only as far away from me as a cathedral ceiling–but it was just a line of demarcation, a belt, that broke up the utterly insane star show. As you wrote, “the stars seem to dangle around your head.” I know exactly what you mean.
@MRW
I enjoyed hearing about that experience. I would like to see the stars and a few caves in Africa.
the only two places where I have ever seen the milky way properly was when we were on the south rim of the Grand Canyon and in Ethiopia where I grew up. The stars there seemed like diamonds in the sky.
“diamonds in the sky” seem like a hyperbolic metaphor until you’ve actually experienced what spawned it. Then it seems insufficient, and the grandeur of it, the unadulterated wonder, stays with you for life.
A rather alarming article. Unfortunately far over-hyped.
Yes, local light pollution disrupt vision of the night sky.
Yes, local light pollution is very bad in urban environments; and almost as bad in suburban environments that cater to major malls, strip malls and giant car dealerships.
But it is not as bad as the article makes out. Just thirteen miles, or over the horizon, minimizes the majority of light pollution. Thirty miles away from the light sources and the night sky is impressively stunning. Seventy miles away and night skies appear uninfluenced by mankind.
I am in favor of lighting rules that minimize light pollution, I am not in favor of aggressive government intervention. it doesn’t make economic sense to throw light an energy where it serves no purpose.
I have my doubts about many critters really being affected by night lights. A turtle that circumnavigates incredible distances to a specific beach is not following someone’s porch light instead of the moon.
Night hawks and bats circle in the dark above a light, occasionally dipping down to nab a juicy bug, apparently happy for the light making their work easy.
What is amazing is how the predators flying just outside of the light remind me of using lights for fishing; where the lights attract baitfish and predatory fish circle just outside of the light in the shadows.
For those urban elites who panic looking up into infinity; i.e. Apeirophobia
http://www.cloudynights.com/uploads/monthly_09_2011/post-48040-14073805896011.jpg
Zeke June 13, 2016 at 11:34 am,
You make a great point, Zeke. With technology developed due to advancements only recently discovered ( the last ~100 years), we can see things in our universe never imagined. In one sense light pollution has decreased our ability to see with our eyes, yet technological development allows us to see much further and in spectrums unimaginable to earlier humans.
I take the time to be in places where I can see all the stars with my own eyes, and I take the time to follow stellar research to see things I could never see, much less understand with my own eyes.
Thank you Zeke, for helping me refine my perspective on this subject.
We have wonderful views and expanded perception now, absolutely David Ball.
Being the parent of Digital Natives, I had hoped that one of my kids would take up astronomical photography:
Tutorial: Motion Timelapse of the Milky Way with Dynamic Perception Stage One and R
So far they are not that interested, although they are very busy with other creative projects.
I wish I had an excust to buy them a camera for time lapse exposures or a motorized slider for Christmas.
The kid who did this video is excellent, just excellent.
The Milky Way is very visible away from city lights and other light sources.
Here’s a view from Yosemite:
http://66.media.tumblr.com/fb125e3ddd327a677aeb7299395d1126/tumblr_ni7wizkAPp1qkfpxgo1_r3_500.jpg
And a view from Chile:
http://66.media.tumblr.com/b800e383cf7d2355aad61870260a4144/tumblr_nxa4su21c01tempjho1_500.jpg
Plenty more Milky Way pics here.